A natural and harmonious human-machine interaction approach is an ideal objective of human beings in manipulating machines, which enables a machine to understand a command transmitted by a person in a natural state. A depth perception technology, as a core technology for human-machine natural interaction, has a wide application prospect in fields such as machine vision, intelligent monitoring, 3D rebuilding, somatosensory interaction, 3D printing, etc. A structured light-based active visual mode, e.g., by projecting, with infrared laser, images of a fixed mode onto a surface of an object so as to encode the surface, collecting the infrared encoded images by an image sensor, and then computing depth information of the object through depth perception, may obtain depth information of an image more accurately. In the near future, the structured light-encoded 3D depth perception technology will take a dominant position.
An infrared encoded image of known depth information is stored as a reference encoded image using a storage device; in use, the stored encoded image is outputted for depth computation, which facilitates the image processing technology to obtain depth information for real-time identifying a 3D-image and capturing actions, so as to make it possible for a person to interact with a terminal using natural manners such as expressions, gestures, and somatosensory actions. Hardware implementation of the depth perception computation may have the following advantages: simple structure, small hardware overheads, and real-time generation of a high-resolution depth image sequence. However, the hardware implementation of the depth perception computation has to face issues such as how to efficiently store encoded images, support of data input output protocols, and how to save hardware resource overheads.